The Minimum Viable Manager: Building Trust, Feedback, and Alignment

Transcript

Shane Hastie: Good day folks. This is Shane Hastie for the InfoQ Engineering Culture Podcast. Today I'm sitting down with Matt Gjertsen. Matt, welcome. Thanks for taking the time to talk to us.

Matt Gjertsen: Absolutely, Shane. I'm really excited to chat with you. So glad, thank you for taking the time as well.

Introductions [01:13]

Shane Hastie: My normal starting point with this is who's Matt?

Matt Gjertsen: I am the founder of a company called Built. Our mission is to train the next generation of technical leaders how to build teams capable of solving the world's hardest problems. I took kind of an interesting path to get here. I was always into the sciences. So, my undergrad was in physics at the Air Force Academy, but then I went a completely different direction for graduate school and got a degree in public relations after that. But then the first half of my professional life, I was an instructor pilot in the US Air Force. And so, I spent a decade plus flying all over the Pacific and all over the world training and teaching air crews how to do all sorts of things. I was always a space nut. So, when I left active duty, I wanted to get closer into the space world. So, I networked my way into SpaceX.

I ended up leading the training development team at SpaceX for about four and a half years where I got to do a little bit of everything, to be honest with you. For one point, for about a year and a half, I think I onboarded every employee in the company, which was pretty amazing. So, I got to work with just some of the most brilliant engineers in the world, which was really incredible. Left there for another startup and then started built about five years ago now where we now work with all kinds of startup companies, startup technology companies of all shapes and sizes. But the focus really is on technical contributors because when I was at SpaceX and all the places I've been at since then, I really saw that jump from being a great engineer to becoming a manager for the first time. It creates such a bottleneck for so many organizations because we just don't do a good job of giving them a roadmap.

That's why I started Build, that's why I wrote Minimum Viable Manager, which is my brand new book. My goal is to provide that roadmap to people.

Why Hasn't the IC-to-Manager Problem Been Solved? [03:06]

Shane Hastie: But this technical contributor to manager problem, it's something we've recognized as an industry and certainly on the Engineering Culture podcast, we've explored it many times. Why haven't we solved that problem yet?

Matt Gjertsen: Yes, it's interesting. I mean, I talk with a lot of people, a lot of leaders, and Casey Handmer, who's the founder of Terraform Industries, I love how he says, "This has been a problem since before the pyramids." Right? I think in many ways, if you look back at the history of humanity, our greatest strength has always been our ability to get large groups of people to work together. And so, like any superhero, our greatest strength is also our greatest weakness. It is the defining feature of us and that is the defining challenge. And I honestly think a lot of it just has to do with there's so much complexity and nuance to it. What works in one situation isn't going to work in another situation. And it could be the people that are involved, it could be the stage of their life that they are in, it could be the organization that they are in. It's something that I think is fundamental.

I mean, as a perfect example, Amazon is famous for their meeting memos where before a meeting you have to write a memo about what the meeting's going to be about. And I've talked with a lot of startup organizations that are starting to scale. Who do they hire? Well, they hire people from Amazon. They hire executives from Amazon because they were really successful and they come in and they try to take the thing that worked at Amazon and have it work in this new company and it always fails because the context just is different. And so, I think that's ultimately why it's so difficult is that there's so many different varieties of it. And that's honestly why I call my book Minimum Viable Manager because I don't think there is a way to say this is what the right manager is. It's like you need to get to a point where you have enough basics to not fail so that you can iterate and learn just like we do in engineering.

You need to lay that foundation so that you can iterate because how you lead is going to be unique to you, your team and your organization.

First Principles Leadership and the Minimum Viable Manager [05:12]

Shane Hastie: So, what is that minimum viable layer?

Matt Gjertsen: I spent a lot of time thinking about this after my time at SpaceX because if there's one thing that SpaceX is known for, it's first principles engineering and first principles thinking. I wanted to spend a lot of time thinking about forget about what other leadership development programs do, forget about what anybody says. How do we scale this back to the simplest level of what it means to be a leader? And so, the whole thing starts with this idea that I call first principles leadership, which says a leader has three fundamental responsibilities, get people to work together, get them to work on the right things and improve their work over time. Those are the three responsibilities. Every skill falls into trying to fulfil one of those responsibilities. And so, to me, a minimum viable manager is the one that is doing what's the first thing you need to do in each one of those buckets.

And that's build trust on your team, set clear expectations and give feedback. So, a minimum viable manager, in order to make sure you have that secure foundation, you need to be able to build trust with your team, set expectations and give feedback. If you can do that, then I honestly think you're probably going to be better than most people than the average manager that anybody's ever had, but it certainly gives you that solid foundation so then you can refine and then you can talk about things like executive presence or whatever, but that's the foundation.

Shane Hastie: Those three things are hard.

Matt Gjertsen: They are. They are. Like so many things in life. It's simple, but not easy.

Building Trust on Your Team [06:58]

Shane Hastie: So, let's dig into those. How do I build trust?

Matt Gjertsen: The way I like to think about it, and this comes from a lot of research around what are the different attributes of trust. And the way I phrase it is that trusting someone comes down to three things, the skills you have, the decisions you make and the connections you build. So, if I trust you, it means for this situation, I believe you have the skills that are required for the situation. I believe that you make good decisions and I believe that you care about me in some way, that we have some kind of connection. And so, I think in any relationship that you have, especially if you're at work and you think you're having a struggling relationship, there's somebody on your team that you don't trust or you think somebody on your team doesn't trust you, it often comes down to one of those three things.

And I think the big challenge for new leaders is that we overemphasize or mis-emphasize the first one, the skills, right? We come in and we're trying to prove our worth because our worth came from our ability to solve problems as an individual contributor. And so, we want to solve every problem. And in reality, that's just showing people that we don't have confidence in ourselves because that individual competence of solving problems isn't the skill anymore when you are a manager. So, we misemphasize that first one. And then that last one, that building connection, especially for technical people. And everybody's different. No everybody needs the same kind of connection, but I'll never forget a leadership development course I was in years ago where the facilitator had kind of this mic drop moment where he asked everybody in the room who has kids and a bunch of people raised their hand and said, "Okay, if you have kids, how many of you would say that your kids are more important than work?"

And of course, everybody said their kids were more important than work. And I said, "Okay, so how many of you with kids would say kids are the most important thing in your life?" And everybody kept their hand raised. So, I said, okay, everybody put your hand up. Then he asked everybody, okay, so you're all managers. How many of your direct reports have kids? And a bunch of people raised their hand. Said, okay, so for everybody with your hand raised, how many of you can tell me the name of their kids? And every single hand went down. None of them did. And said, okay, so let me get this straight. We're sitting here, you're asking people to come to work, you're asking them to work late, to give their most, to really be committed, and you don't know the first thing about the most important thing in their life.

Why would they trust you? So, we say it is hard, but if we think about it for things like that, it's just like, oh, let me keep track of my kids' names. If they don't have kids, what's their pet's name? What do they enjoy doing on the weekend? Do I know the first thing about them as a person? And this truly isn't going to be true for everybody, but I think for most people, if you can get some of those basics, it really goes a long way to building trust and connection.

Shane Hastie: Yes. I wonder how many of our audience are listening to this and feeling a little bit uncomfortable right now. Do I know the name of those kids?

Matt Gjertsen: Yes. And as powerful as that can be, it is also important to recognize that, and again, this goes back to your question of why is this so hard, is what builds trust with one person will break trust with another person, right? There are people who don't want to share that. And so, you have to be careful about how you get to know... every person on your team is going to be different. How you get to know them is going to be different. The questions that you ask them is going to be different. And so, it's starting simply of showing the faintest caring about what they're doing outside of work. What'd you do this weekend? What's the last movie that you saw? What kind of books do you like to read? Do you ever read books? Starting with stuff like that, and that kind of gets the ball rolling a little bit towards having those other conversations.

Giving Feedback Well [10:49]

Shane Hastie: The other one that is, in my experience and with people I talk to is a tough one, is feedback. How do we give feedback well?

Matt Gjertsen: The first thing that I'll say before giving feedback well is I think giving feedback well starts by asking for feedback well. So, many courses on feedback just start with, this is how you give feedback. But if you don't have a culture where feedback is a norm, it's going to be a struggle to do it. And so, I always start by teaching people, look, you can't just sit with your team and be like, "Hey, do you have any feedback for me?" Because when you ask that, nobody has any answers and it's a struggle for two reasons. The first is that it's asking, do you have any feedback for me? It's putting it on them. If they say anything, they're the ones saying that there's a problem or whatever. And then the second part is that it's, "Do you have any feedback for me?" It's completely wide open and just leaves this and creates like a blank page syndrome like authors have.

And so, I start by teaching people, you have to ask for feedback in a way that is both specific and assumes there is feedback. So, what is one thing I could have done better in our team meeting today to keep us on track? It narrows the scope of what you're asking them to think of and you're asking in a way where you're saying what is one thing? So, when they say one thing, you can't blame them, you ask them for that one thing. I think that's the first thing is I would say is making it clear that feedback is a normal thing, that you want feedback. And then giving feedback, when you get to the stage of giving feedback, I think there's a lot of techniques. There's like SBI for situation behavior impact. There's coin, context, observation impact and next steps. There's lots of them that are out there, but ultimately what it comes down to is you need to make sure you are giving feedback in a way where you're giving feedback on a behavior, on an action, on something that can be seen without attributing any emotions to it, right?

The classic one is, and maybe this wouldn't be feedback, but you're thinking in your head, "Oh, this person's really lazy," or, "Oh, I just don't think you care enough about the work we're doing." And you have no idea. If somebody shows up too late to work, you have no idea if it's because they don't care or because they got a flat tire. And if they got a flat tire and you say they don't care, their arms go up, they're defensive, they're pushing back. And so, you always give feedback only on those tangible things that you see. If you want to find motivations, you can ask about it, but you can never assume those motivations. And so, it's being really specific. And then the last thing I'll say on this since I know I've been going for a little while is, especially if you're new, so I like to put this in three phases.

If you're a new manager or you want to get better at feedback or make more of a feedback culture on your team, for a month, do nothing but practice asking for feedback. Just ask for feedback from everybody. Start doing it in all your one-on-ones and your team meetings. Just make that normal. Do that for a month. And then for a month, give nothing but what I call reinforcing feedback. So, you're giving that same specific feedback, but on the things you want them to continue doing. And honestly, these are the ones where we're most likely to just say good job, but if you say good job, nobody knows what you're talking about. And so, be really clear of this was the thing I saw that I thought was good, please keep doing it and do that for a month so everybody knows, "Oh, they're noticing me."

And then and only then do you start bringing in the redirecting feedback where you're asking people to change their behaviour. And through all that, it stacks on itself. So, you have to keep asking for feedback, you have to keep giving the reinforcing feedback, and then you start giving the redirecting feedback.

Managing People Who Used to Be Your Peers [14:46]

Shane Hastie: One of the tough things that we often face is I get promoted to a team leader in the team that I've been working in. So, I was a peer, I've been a peer, and now I'm their manager.

Matt Gjertsen: Yes.

Shane Hastie: This shifts, this gets to be uncomfortable.

Matt Gjertsen: It's really funny that you asked me that because I just recorded a video on this yesterday and it's something that honestly, it's not something that I'm as much of an expert in. And I think it's because of my background in the military where this was so normal. It was just like, "Look, there's rules, there's ranks. It's just a thing." And because there's such a rigid structure to it didn't come up as a problem that often, I feel like. So, I had to spend some time just the last couple days thinking about this. And I think there's two extremes that people can sometimes go to. The one extreme is to ignore it and pretend nothing is happening. You stay friends, you keep having lunch every day, you keep doing things on the weekends. Oh, it's fine. Everything's fine. And that will cause one of two things to happen.

Either you are actually favouring them and you're doing things to where you're actually giving them more resources or giving them the decisions or you're actually overtly favouring them and that's clearly bad or you are not, but everyone thinks you are because people will just assume. And then the other extreme is you completely kind of break away and in that case you lose a friend. And so, as I was thinking about it the other day, without tons of nuance and tons of details, the best thing to do that I think often gets missed is to just deal with the elephant in the room. As soon as you can, you need to sit down with the other person. There might be several of them, but especially if you have a close friend, one in particular that you need to sit down and just like, "Hey, look, this is the situation and this is what I'm thinking, this is what's going on."

I think this is an excellent time for people to talk to HR, not to necessarily set rules, but just as somebody to bounce ideas off of and be like, "Hey, what are the company policies? Is this okay? Is this not okay? What have you seen work before?" It's a great time to just have that conversation with them before anything happens. I know people don't like to go up to HR unless they get told to go to HR, but the average HR business partner that I know wants to have these kinds of conversations with their people. And so, you can start there, have the one-on-one of this just is a thing, we're going to have to make some changes. And that I think is the first thing that gets missed is just clearly addressing the elephant in the room.

Developing Others While Developing Yourself [17:31]

Shane Hastie: Developing others, helping others get better over time. I also need to develop myself. How do I do those in parallel?

Matt Gjertsen: Carefully. I mean, yes, you're developing others. Yes, we always have to develop ourselves and there's many different avenues. I think this is going to be highly dependent on your organization of what kind of support they give. But I think the thing that I think is most important with this, with any kind of development is I like to use the theory of constraints, which largely comes from the manufacturing world where there's a thousand things that are happening in a manufacturing line, but at any given time, there's exactly one thing that is holding back that whole manufacturing line. There's one thing that's the constraint. There's one process. There's one step that's the constraint. And if we can fix that, we can fix everything. And so, rather than thinking about, I need to make myself a better leader, you should be thinking about what is the one thing that's holding me back right now?

And so, as an example, to fit into those three buckets, the things that I like to ask is where am I spending most of my time? Am I spending my time dealing with employee issues where they're all talking behind each other's back or people are coming to me with problems or I'm having to resolve personality disagreements with people? Or am I having to spend all of my time making decisions? Everybody comes to me to figure out the solution or make the call, take the risk, figure out the next step, or am I spending all of my time fixing mistakes that people are making or redoing work that other people are doing? That's an example of, well, if it's the first one, then your constraint is trust on your team and you need to start focusing on how do I build a cohesive team where people can work together and talk to one another?

If it's the middle one, people aren't making their own decisions, well then I would think about are you providing enough clarity? Are you providing enough information where they can make those decisions and think about are we setting expectations appropriately so that people know what's next and know what to do? Or if it's the last one, well, there's a skill problem on the team and I need to focus on coaching people and raising their skills. That I think is the key to any kind of development, especially everybody's super busy. Every manager that I know still has individual contributor work that they have to do. And so, they're trying to balance it all and you're stepping into this new role. And so, I think the key is to think about doing things one at a time. It's not about making myself a better leader. It's what do I think is the skill that's holding me and my team back right now?

Okay, I'm going to improve that skill. And that might take a quarter, that might take a year and that's okay. You're going to make more progress that way than doing what honestly I did when I first became a leader.

If you look over on my right side, it's just this whole bookshelf filled with books. I was the nightmare manager where I'm a new manager, I don't know what I'm doing. So, I'm tearing through all these books and every other week, I'm coming into my team being like, "So, I just read this book. I want to try this new thing." It's the worst way to do it. So, focus on one thing at a time. And honestly, this is going back to my coaching background beyond being an instructor pilot. I used to coach people how to run marathons and I think it's amazing what you can do with a singular focus.

And so, if you pick three books and three podcasts and they're all on the same topic, they're all on decision making or all on delegation or all on feedback, the speed with which you can improve your performance is quite amazing if you focus on one thing at a time.

Shane Hastie: The deliberate practice and feedback.

Matt Gjertsen: Yes.

Why Human Skills Matter More in the Age of AI [21:26]

Shane Hastie: It's impossible today to talk about what's happening in organizations and teams without touching on the AI thing.

Matt Gjertsen: Yes. Before this conversation, I was looking back at all your past episodes. It's just like AI, AI. And it makes sense. If you're in software and you're not talking about AI, I don't know what you're talking about.

Shane Hastie: I'm going to assert that in the world of AI, the human stuff becomes even more important. How do we dig into that?

Matt Gjertsen: Yes, I agree with you. And from my perspective, I'll bring in some insight from at least what I'm seeing. As the head of Built, I'm selling, right? I'm out there talking to companies. I'm out there trying to bring on new clients. And I'll tell you, for the last at least 18 months, there was a big period there where I think we were thinking about are we going to need people anymore? There was a lot of de-investment, disinvestment in the people skills, the leadership skills. Everybody was pushing it off. And we've, in my opinion, turned the corner in all of the conversations, in the conversation, the core AI conversation, the AI conversation on what the impact is going to be for our society. And I'm seeing it in my business in that people are suddenly realizing, "Oh, we are still going to have people around. We are still going to need people managers."

And I would a hundred percent agree with you. I think it becomes all the more important. And the example that I always come back to is Elon Musk's explanation of what a company is. One of the ways he describes a company is through a vector sum, right? Every person in an organization is a vector. A vector is a magnitude and a direction, right? And so, the magnitude is how much skill and ability they have, and the direction is what they're pointing it at. So, every individual has their vector and an organization is just a sum of all those vectors, right? So, if you want to improve your organization, you have two options, right? You can increase the magnitude of the vectors or you can more tightly align those vectors so they're all pointing in the same direction. And especially that last part, that alignment is one of the key pillars of what it means to be a leader.

That's that center point of making sure people are working on the right things. And so, I think it's inarguable that in the age of AI, everyone is going to be getting more effective, more powerful. Their magnitude is going to go up, which means the alignment of them becomes all the more critical, keeping people going in the right direction. If you have somebody go rogue at the wrong time, I mean, whole databases will get wiped out as we've seen with agents. You got to keep that alignment. It's not just important with agents, it's important with people.

Alignment: What Separates Good Leaders From Great Ones [24:29]

Shane Hastie: I love that metaphor and it makes such a lot of sense. That alignment though, that's really, really hard.

Matt Gjertsen: It is hard, but it's the reason why leaders like Elon Musk or Steve Jobs or Jensen Huang are who they are. I don't think it can be argued, it could certainly be argued, but in my opinion, the key thing that makes them so effective is their startling ability to drive alignment amongst their people to present that long-term clear north star is one of the biggest differentiating factors of good leaders to great leaders, I would say. And it'll be really interesting to see what happens with Apple and their change in leadership of who is leading them now and the kind of north star that they will be able to provide. It's going to be an interesting case study and exactly that. So, the one more thing, I was thinking about this after I started playing around with AI a lot recently. I do not know how to code myself, but I'm always looking for ways to make my workshops more effective and practice is one of the most important things.

And so, I started using Claude Code to build a bunch of online apps that can be used to practice some of the things that I'm teaching in my workshops. And as I was doing that and reflecting on the book, I think the key thing that's going to hold back AI and going to hold back implementation of AI is that what AI really does is it makes every person a manager. These skills that we've worked so hard and had such difficulty training just like 10% of our employee population, everyone needs that now to be effective because every AI tool has different skills and abilities and can do different things well and less well. And so, just like that first pillar, it's maybe not building trust, but it's getting to know them, know their skills, know their weaknesses, know how to use them. The alignment piece we just talked about, getting your agents to work on the right things, setting clear expectations is incredibly important.

And then figuring out how to create feedback loops, whether that's building skills or getting different agents to review each other's work. All of these things fundamentally come back to the same thing that managers have been trying to do with people. And so, really the only difference is that maybe the agents aren't going to talk back to you in the same way or you don't have to worry about them giving you some strange look when you say something, but the fundamental skills are the same. And so, I could imagine a world where becoming a manager actually becomes easier because you're having to practice these skills so much, you just need to add a layer of, "Oh, well now I'm doing it with people, which is important," but historically I don't think we've had as much practice of setting expectations for others as an individual contributor. And now you need to with the AI.

Teaching Individuals to Take Advantage of AI [27:24]

Shane Hastie: Which goes back to our education but not educating individual contributors to think like that.

Matt Gjertsen: A friend of mine has a talk that she proposed or a panel that she proposed to South by Southwest that she was asking people to vote on. And it was something like why in a time with so many potentials and so many tools and more is possible than ever, do so many people feel uncertain and limited and they don't know what to do? And I think at least a part of it is because we've never had systems, broad scale systems in place, either at the company level or the culture level to teach people how to take advantage of a lot of these tools. And I'm not even talking about the technical ability, but just the way you think about what is possible, it's going to be a challenge. There's a lot to do, but the companies that invest in it, the companies that figure it out, I think are going to be the ones that succeed.

Deciding Whether the Management Path Is Right for You [28:26]

Shane Hastie: Coming close to the end, but what's the one important question I haven't asked you?

Matt Gjertsen: That's a good question. The question that I often get is where can I start? What's the single most important thing for people to do, especially for technical people to do? And one of the things that I think is really important, even though we already just said even individual contributors are going to have to develop these manager skills, I think it's really important to recognize, especially if you've lived your whole life wanting to be an engineer, wanting to build great code or build amazing tools, is you need to realize that becoming a people manager is a wholly new path. It is a different thing. It's a whole new set of skills. And almost by definition, that means you're going to lose ability in the thing you liked to do before. There's this book called The E-Myth that's about entrepreneurship.

And one of the metaphors that it uses is just because you like to bake bread doesn't mean you should start a bakery, because running a bakery involves all kinds of other stuff that has nothing to do with baking bread. And so, I think it's really important for people to understand just the different skill sets that are going to be required, the different things you're going to be able to do and ask, "Is that a path I want to go down?" I think the best companies today are companies that are creating two paths, developmental paths for their employees where you can develop as an individual contributor and you can develop as a people manager. They're two different tracks. Sure, the people manager track might take you farther, you're not going to get to the CEO on the technical contributor track, but the best organizations do that so that people aren't doing the, "Oh, I'm going to become a manager because that's the next step. I want to get paid more. I have to become a manager."

Hopefully, the people listening aren't in that kind of position. And if you're asking yourself, you need to be honest with yourself of like, "Do I want to go work on these new skills or do I just want to keep getting better and increase my influence as a technical contributor?" And if that's the road that you want to go down, you're going to be better off finding a place where you can do that than taking the manager role. Gallup has been doing research for 20 years on how engaged people are at work, and it keeps falling every single year. And the latest research, I believe it was managers, only 20% of managers are engaged at work. And so, if the managers aren't excited about coming to work, then what are their employees thinking, right? And so, the worst thing you can do is take on a manager role just because you think that's the next step. You need to really think to yourself of like, "Is this the path that I want to go down?"

Shane Hastie: Matt, a lot of deep stuff in there. If people want to continue the conversation, where can they find you?

Matt Gjertsen: The best place is definitely LinkedIn. I am really active on LinkedIn. I love having spirited conversations about this stuff, so definitely check me out there. I'll answer any questions go as deep as anybody wants to on any of this stuff.

Shane Hastie: Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure talking to you.

Matt Gjertsen: Thank you so much. It's been great.

Mentioned:

• Matt Gjertsen on LinkedIn
• Book – Minimum Viable Manager